Jesse Tangen-Mills

Twelve Ways You Must Die in Colombia Before Seeing Must See Things

Slipping in the Shower
Of all places, here. All the way over here. There.

Poisonous Snake Bite
While visiting your wife’s family in La Guajira a snake bites you. You listen to your dirge as delivered by your wife and her family, before dying on stretcher. It doesn’t feel like much except stinging, which you guess is okay, or was okay.

H1N1
You blow off what you think is a cold and it kills you.

Bus Accident
Finally convinced to go mountain climbing, you worry for four hours about getting kidnapped or shot, before your bus tries to pass a cargo truck and nearly succeeds when it smacks into a car from the opposite lane, that sends you further left, flattening the safest word in spanglish: el guardrail.

Hit and Run
Try to cross la 19, after having a few 22oz beers and a public mini-van stuffed with bored passengers hits you. The passengers look at you while they wait outside to transfer to another bus, while the medics flip me onto a stretcher. Before the cops can get there to write the report; the driver, realizing the severe consequences of this certainly fatal accident, feigns looking for something in the mini-van, until he can crawl into the driver´s seat and speed away.

Food Poisoning
This happens later. What they think is a tumor is a worm. Your brain is home to all sorts of things. They blame pork. You think they’re the ones with worms for brains. Two weeks later you’re head cheese.

AIDS
Sleep with a prostitute in Quibdó the color of melon and sand. Be drunk enough to believe she likes you and wants it more personal, and that’s why she begs for you to take it off, but really she just despises the krinkly condoms in her innards. That night leaves you guessing.

Stab Wound
A hallucinating homeless man stabs you in your lower back with a knife made more soldered aluminum, after you refuse to give him money. You don’t feel pain, but know at best, you’ll be stuck on a dialysis machine for the rest of your life. At worst, you’ll be dead.

Cancer
Everyone told me not to walk on the major traffic arteries so I wouldn´t inhale all that exhaust. I liked walking, so I did anyway.

Gun Shot Wound
The embassy tells you not to go there, but you do, because your in-laws live there. Your brother-in-law, a local politician, convinces you to accompany him to Manaure, where the indigenous women wear colorful cotton robes that billow in the desert gusts like corporeal streamers. Trucks the size of tanks have been parked in a circle, like an old-time Ponderosa. They take turns playing car systems to play vallenato. You’re not particularly happy about any of this, but you get drunk enough to not feel anything. Around dawn one of the big-bellied car owners, eases himself into a plastic lawn chair and his .45 goes off leaving one in your chest. The nearest hospital is two hours away. As if it mattered.

Witchcraft
After two bottles of aguardiente you get the hiccups. Everyone shouts out how you should get rid of it, but it’s your friend’s father-in-law who just touches your neck then the bottoms of your feet, and instantly it goes away. The next day they find you. Dead.

Plane Crash
It´s safer than nearly everything you´ve done on your trip. Statistically this is impossible. Statistically and sardonically you are dead with so many things you must see.

Jesse Tangen-Mills lives in Bogota, Colombia. He writes a column at Bookslut about Latin American literature and is a regular contributor to Arcadia, a Colombian arts and culture magazine.